Ranking Nations for Economic and Personal Liberty

I eagerly combed through that report, which (predictably) had Hong Kong and Singapore as the top two jurisdictions. I was glad to see that the United States climbed to #11.

The good news is that America had dropped as low as #18, so we’ve been improving the past few years.

The bad news is that the U.S. used to be a top-5 country in the 1980s and 1990s.

But let’s set aside America’s economic ranking and deal with a different question. I’m frequently asked why European nations with big welfare states still seem like nice places.

My answer is that they are nice places. Yes, they get terrible scores on fiscal policy, but they tend to be very pro-market in areas like trade, monetary policy, regulation, and rule of law. So they almost always rank in the top-third for economic freedom.

Moreover, there’s more to life than economics. Most European nations also are nice places because they are civilized and tolerant. For instance, check out the newly released Human Freedom Index, which measures both economic liberty and personal liberty. As you can see, Switzerland is ranked #1 and Europe is home to 12 of the top 16 nations.

And when you check out nations at the bottom, you won’t find a single European country.

Instead, you find nations like Venezuela and Zimbabwe. Indeed, the lowest-ranked Western European country is Greece, which is ranked #60 and just missed being in the top-third of countries.

Having now engaged in the unusual experience of defending Europe, let’s take a quick look at the score for the United States.

As you can see, America’s #17 ranking is a function of our position for economic freedom (#11) and our position for personal freedom (#24).

For what it’s worth, America’s worst score is for “civil justice,” which basically measures rule of law. It’s embarrassing that we’re weak in that category, but not overly surprising.

Anyhow, here’s how the U.S. score has changed over time.

Let’s close with a few random observations.

Other nations also improved, not just the United States. Among advanced nations, Singapore jumped 16 spots and is now tied for #18. There were also double-digit increases for Suriname (up 14 spots, to #56), Cambodia (up 16 spots, to #58), and Botswana (up 22 spots, to #63). The biggest increase was Swaziland, which jumped 25 spots to #91, though it’s worth pointing out that it’s easier to make big jumps for nations with lower initial rankings.

Now let’s look at nations moving in the wrong direction. Among developed nations, Canada dropped 7 spots to #11. Still a very good score, but a very bad trend. It’s also unfortunate to see Poland drop 10 spots, to #32. Looking at developing nations, Brunei Darussalam plummeted an astounding 52 spots, down to #115, followed by Tajikistan, which fell 46 spots to #118. Brazil is also worth highlighting, since it plunged 23 spots to #120.

P.S. I don’t know if Moldova, Ukraine, and Russia count as European countries or Asian nations, but they all rank in the bottom half. In any event, they’re not Western European nations.

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[…] Liberty – It is basically a tautology that ever-larger government necessitates a reduction in liberty. Not in a totalitarian sense, but taxes and regulations constrain the freedom of individual to earn […]

These sort of indexes are interesting, but must be taken with a grain of salt. What criteria did they use to come up with a “freedom score”, and how did they weight them?

For example, if you read the report on this one, 5% of the score is gay rights and 5% is whether people have the legal right to say that they are men when they’re really women and vice versa. So those two things together are 10% of the score. Freedom of the press is about 12%. So gay/transgender rights are almost as important as freedom of the press. Really? And is the ability of mentally ill people to have their delusions legally recognized really a human right, much less 5% of human rights?

The score also factors in whether property is equally divided between sons and daughters when the parents die, with the assertion that failure to do so is discrimination against women. But this makes all sorts of assumptions about the role of men and women in society and all the other laws and customs that a country might have about men and women. If a society puts the primary burden of supporting a family on a man, arguably it is fair that when his father dies, he gets the family business rather than his sister, etc. In most non-western societies, some laws favor women and some laws favor men. It is not necessarily fair to pick two laws — inheritance and divorce — and judge fairness solely on those two.

They reduce a country’s score if it has a high murder rate. I certainly wouldn’t want to live in a place where people are routinely gunned down in the street, but “low crime” is a very different thing from freedom. If you’re going to include crime rates, than this isn’t just a “freedom” index any more, it’s your idea of how nice a place this is to live in. At which point, why don’t you consider climate, how pretty the sunsets are, and whether friendly pets are readily available?

The most bizarre criterion is that if a country is at war or attacked by terrorists, they reduce the country’s score if many of the ENEMY soldiers or terrorists are being killed. So if a country is winning a war, that, by definition, makes it less free. I don’t understand the reasoning behind that at all.

some years ago a psych professor designed an experiment with mice… a closed population had everything it needed… plenty of food… nesting material… everything… at first… the mouse heaven preformed as expected… lots of population growth… a Utopian Mouseville… after a period of time the mice stopped reproducing… they exhibited aberrant behavior… and ultimately the entire colony died… perhaps populations… of any species just have a life cycle… once it is completed… they stop reproducing…adopt destructive behavior….. their society declines…. and they all die………………

Shocking that we rank below those nations on these oddly crafted indices yet we rank number one as the country where these same countries’ citizens what to immigrate to. Please explain why more people are not scratching and clawing to get into Hong Kong, New Zealand, Ireland, etc. and other highly-ranked countries…